Special effects based on fluid elements have become increasingly more common as part of animations, digital movie production, and other types of digital content. An artist, for instance, may use fluid elements as part of animation to create an appearance of a dragon breathing fire. Other examples of fluid elements include smoke rising from a fire, water flowing over a cliff, a lava flow from a volcano, and so forth.
In conventional techniques, the artist typically formed a video out of pre-captured videos of fluids in real life having a desired appearance, e.g., a running stream, a campfire, and so forth. A limitation with this technique, however, is that the motion properties of these videos remain fixed to follow a motion and appearance of fluid elements in the video and thus cannot deviate, readily, from this motion or appearance. Accordingly, when finer control is desired by the user to deviate from these fixed motion properties, the artist is forced in conventional techniques to resort to full fluid simulation in which motion and appearance characteristics are specified manually by a user. This is conventionally followed by an advanced rendering algorithm that requires detailed knowledge on the part of the artist in order to obtain a realistic appearance of a fluid, e.g., fire. Additionally, limitations involving resolution, complexity of material properties, lighting, or other parameters may hinder achievement of this realistic appearance. Even in instances in which the artist has this detailed knowledge, achievement is still hindered because of the complexity of transferring the ever changing characteristics that make up the ever changing appearance of the fluid.